ve an impression of great force. He would have been picked out of
a multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because
he had an air of command and the aloofness which shows a man sufficient
unto himself.

As he stood gazing reflectively into the sunset, a strange, plaintive,
birdlike note pierced the still evening air. His head lifted quickly,
yet he did not look in the direction of the sound, which came from the
woods behind the house. He did not stir, and his eyes half-closed, as
though he hesitated what to do. The call was not that of a bird familiar
to the Western world. It had a melancholy softness like that of the
bell-bird of the Australian bush. Yet, in the insistence of the note, it
was, too, a challenge or a summons.

Three times during the past week he had heard it--once as he went by the
market-place of Manitou; once as he returned in the dusk from Tekewani's
Reservation, and once at dawn from the woods behind the house. His
present restlessness and suppressed agitation had been the result.

It was a call he knew well. It was like a voice from a dead world. It
asked, he knew, for an answering call, yet he had not given it. It was
seven days since he first heard it in the market-place, and in that
seven days he had realized that nothing in this world which has ever
been, really ceases to be. Presently, the call was repeated. On the
three former occasions there had been no repetition. The call had
trembled in the air but once and had died away into unbroken silence.
Now, however, it rang out with an added poignancy. It was like a bird
calling to its vanished mate.

With sudden resolution Druse turned. Leaving the veranda, he walked
slowly behind the house into the woods and stood still under the
branches of a great cedar. Raising his head, a strange, solemn note came
from his lips; but the voice died away in a sharp broken sound which was
more human than birdlike, which had the shrill insistence of authority.
The call to him had been almost ventriloquial in its nature. His lips
had not moved at all.

There was silence for a moment after he had called into the void, as it
were, and then there appeared suddenly from behind a clump of juniper,
a young man of dark face and upright bearing. He made a slow obeisance
with a gesture suggestive of the Oriental world, yet not like the usual
gesture of the East Indian, the Turk or the Persian; it was composite of
all.

He could not have been more